They started it with a bike parade. Julia and Ethan did their bikes and Elliott and Agnes did their scooters. Since Christian broke his arm, I pulled him and Asher along in our new bike trailer. A very nice lady in our ward sold it to us for just $35!
They also had stilts, hand carts, a few pioneer games, and square dancing. Julia convinced me to do a square dance for her. I am not super in to dancing, but I wanted to be a good dad so I said okay. Then the dance started and it was one of those ones where you trade your partners so I didn't even get to dance with her. She had a blast doing it though.
The highlight of the night was the food. Rebecca picked up 300 pieces of fried chicken. There were also a ton of delicious jello salads, regular salads, rolls, baked beans, potato salads, and desserts. Everyone ate a ton, but there were still tons of left overs. We took home probably 25 pieces of chicken and our old home teachers sent us a big bowl of potato salad. I remember I never liked potato salad growing up, but it is one of those things where my taste buds have changed and I like it a lot now - especially the one that they gave us.
On Friday I took the kids fishing in the morning. We struck out this time and didn't catch anything. While we were gone our washing machine finally gave up. It had been having issues over the past couple of months, but we had always been able to find a way around it by changing some of the water use settings. On Friday though nothing worked. It is always unfortunate when the washer breaks because by default it is always the worst time. All of the children had worn through their clothes from the previous week and the laundry room is packed with dirty clothes. I spent the rest of the afternoon bringing it in to a repair shop. They said they wouldn't be able to check it out until August 2nd. So I looked around at a few stores to see if I could find a cheap, but reliable back up one. We were really frustrated with this washer though since we spent extra money to get a really good one and it broke down on us so quickly. The Maytag people on the phone weren't very helpful and it seems like their 10 year warranty doesn't really cover anything. Talking to people at the appliance shops, they said that they do not sell Maytags any more because they often have these types of small problems. This led to a long Friday and Saturday of washing clothes by hand in our bathtub.
Friday did end on a positive note though. We went to a movie in the park. They were playing Lego Batman! I love these type of community activities. We went a couple hours early and the children just played in the park. They were also handing out free freeze pops. The kids loved that they got to stay up until almost midnight.
On Saturday we had wanted to do a family bike ride, but plans have changed some ever since Christian broke his arm. Instead, we did a walk/scooter ride. We did some garage sale shopping and found some pretty good deals. We found some clothes for all of the children and a baby seat for a bike. I think we are all set now for the Haiwatha trail, as long as Christian gets the okay to ride his bike with his cast on. Then the walk. We were going to one about 5 minutes out of town, but then we noticed that we were lower on gas than we originally thought. So we ended up just doing one that we had done before and it was really nice. Everyone was just having a good time playing around and enjoying each other's company.
To cap the weekend off, Rebecca and I celebrated our 12 anniversary today! That is 1/3 of our lives that we have spent together. It has been wonderful.
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